Confirmation Bias

One of the most important things that impacts us in personal, professional, and financial life is an effect called confirmation bias. Put more simply, this is a tendency for people to only seek out information that confirms what they already think. In many cases, people will examine the same information and come to wildly different conclusions because of their internal biases. Naturally, this makes objective thought and analysis extremely difficult to perform since we are not always the best judge of ourselves.

This effect becomes especially dangerous when it enters the financial arena. When evaluating investment strategies, many people (such as Robert Merton and Myron Scholes of Long-Term Capital Management) fail to examine possibilities that lay outside of their theory. Many hedge funds and derivatives traders create highly complex formula’s based on many assumptions that are usually true, but not always true. These financial models typically use large amounts of leverage, and are prone to tremendous losses if market movements do not match the model assumptions. Another iteration of this self-delusion is the tremendous run-up in housing prices that was based on the assumption home prices would never go down. There was ample evidence to indicate that housing prices could not increase forever, but it was completely ignored in favor of self-delusion by the government agencies, financial institutions, and borrowers who perpetuated the financial crisis.

The impact of confirmation bias also enters the political sphere on a regular basis. There are Nobel laureate economists in favor of higher taxes who claim to have evidence in support of their position and Nobel laureate economists in favor of lower taxes who also have evidence in support of their claim. When the government funds research studies, it is not surprising that the results of the study almost always come back confirming the original theory or hypothesis. Other ways that this phenomenon works its way into the political landscape is through metrics that are impossible to prove or disprove. One of the most famous is an ambiguous employment metric of “jobs created or saves”. It is impossible to objectively define a “saved” job, so the intellectual delusion is perpetuated.

The confirmation bias effect has even found its way into the scientific domain, as demonstrated most prominently in the climate science movement. What used to be called “global warming” has now been changed “climate change”. This makes every observation of temperature a “confirmation” of the hypothesis since the climate by its very nature is always changing. It should not come as any sort of surprise that the so-called “consensus” concerning climate change was completely fictional. It only resulted from suppressing voices of dissent and stifling debate so that the self-delusion of confirmation bias could continue without restraint. If the science was so strong, then it should be able to withstand a rigorous debate. If the proponents of the theory are not willing to debate, then it stands to reason that the science is not very strong.

In the end, it is and always will be extremely difficult to be objective. As astute individuals, we must learn to recognize the impacts of confirmation bias in ourselves and in the world around us. Since most of us do not possess the ability to change the world, we must squarely focus on the things that we do have the power to change… namely ourselves. When making an important decision, it is imperative to ‘step back’ and determine whether there is something we haven’t thought of that could squash our plans. By actively avoiding the bias of confirmation, it will help us to make more informed decisions and live a more fulfilled life.